WASHINGTON, D.C. — A nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank led by President Berin Szóka has teamed up with more than 70 legal scholars, free speech groups, and other experts to formally express their collective concerns over recent threats by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr “to punish broadcasters for airing constitutionally protected speech—an attempt to pressure media outlets through vague legal claims and regulatory intimidation.”
The letter sent to the Commission Chairman by TechFreedom aims to explain how such threats undermine both the First Amendment and the Constitution’s guarantees of due process.
“The FCC has no authority to police content,” warned Szóka. “So brazen were Carr’s threats to Disney-ABC over Jimmy Kimmel that even the Republican Senator responsible for FCC oversight, Sen. Ted Cruz, compared him to a mafioso from Goodfellas. Carr himself once said the FCC has no mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest’—yet that’s exactly what he’s now doing. The Supreme Court has been clear: government has no ‘power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content,’ and even false speech is protected by the First Amendment.”
As Szóka and the coalition with Tech Freedom believe, Kimmel’s remarks “couldn’t possibly satisfy the FCC’s existing standards for news distortion or hoaxes. The FCC’s News Distortion Policy and Broadcast Hoax Rule set a very high bar for enforcement; they require extrinsic evidence of deliberate, provable distortion by a licensee’s top management. Kimmel’s comments, even if inaccurate, clearly do not meet these legal standards, and he is not even employed by the licensees themselves. Moreover, he has obviously prejudged these cases. His invitation of complaints against ABC licensees would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. This isn’t the first time Carr has weaponized the 1949 News Distortion Policy, and sadly, it won’t be the last. Carr appears hellbent on reshaping American media to serve the political agenda of the White House.”
Szóka concluded, “Make no mistake: critical speech has been, and will be, chilled. Disney bent, even if it didn’t break. To avoid retaliation, many comedians and journalists will self-censor, or their corporate employers will muzzle them. Such anticipatory obedience, warns Timothy Snyder, a leading scholar of authoritarianism, ‘teach[es] power what it can do.’ Carr claims to be speaking for American viewers, but he has no business telling publishers what their viewers really want. The Supreme Court has said the First Amendment demands that government ‘leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.’”
To view the coalition letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, please click here.
